More profound than the U.S. and Israel's lack of rational legality and absence of moral authority, is their failure to provide cogent evidence that a nuclear Iran poses an existential threat to Israel or any other nation.

Israel, under Netanyahu's leadership, seems to want to drive a dynamic in which it demonstrates its power by compelling the president to attack Iran on its behalf. This is neither in Israel's real interests -- nor America's.

It is curious that the most powerful man in the world representing the most powerful military in the world who accepted the Nobel Peace Prize defending "just" wars has "no say" over $4 billion annual military aid to Israel.

Israel's substantial contributions to U.S. interests are an underappreciated aspect of this relationship and deserve equal billing to shared values and historical responsibility as rationales for American support of Israel.

There is a real danger that if Iran had nuclear weapons capability it could transfer that to other groups. But the particular threat that Israel is talking up -- that of a conventional nuclear strike from Iran -- is overblown.

If the Israeli nuclear program grew out of fear of its neighbors and the conviction that the Holocaust justified any measures Israel took to ensure its survival, from where does Iran's justification come?